A study conducted by Daniel Bartels, Columbia Business School, Marketing, and David Pizarro, Cornell University, Psychology found that people who endorse actions consistent with an ethic of utilitarianism—the view that what is the morally right thing to do is whatever produces the best overall consequences—tend to possess psychopathic and Machiavellian personality traits. n the study, Bartels and Pizarro gave participants a set of moral dilemmas widely used by behavioral scientists who study morality, like the following: "A runaway trolley is about to run over and kill five people, and you are standing on a footbridge next to a large stranger;...

China is taking a stepped approach to the development of its human spaceflight programme China is about to launch its first space laboratory, Tiangong-1. The 10.5m-long, cylindrical module will be unmanned for the time being, but the country's astronauts, or yuhangyuans, are expected to visit it next year. Tiangong-1 will demonstrate the critical technologies needed by China to build a fully fledged space station - something it has promised to do at the end of the decade. The space lab is set to ride to orbit atop a Long March 2F rocket. State media say the lift-off from the Jiuquan...

An alleged SAT cheating ring has been busted in Long Island, N.Y., resulting in the arrest of seven students. At least six high school students allegedly paid 19-year-old college student Sam Eshaghoff thousands of dollars to take the test for them, prosecutors said. Over the past year, six students from Great Neck North High School in Mineola paid Eshaghoff between $1,500 and $2,500 to take the test on their behalf, according to Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice.

The source claims Monica has more or less given up on finding love. 'Monica still feels like she's the punchline to a dirty joke,' the source said. 'The publicity over her affair with Clinton ruined her chances of ever finding a decent guy. In June she made a rare outing with a small dinner party at Lucy's El Adobe Cafe in Hollywood.

Zagreb/Belgrade 4 Aug. (AKI) - Croatia on Thursday celebrated the 16th anniversary of military operation “Storm” which crushed a Serb rebellion and sparked exodus of some 200,000 Serbs, while Serbia commemorated victims of what it calls the worst ethnic cleansing in Europe after World War Two. Croatian Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor said operation “Storm” was a “brilliant military action” and a great victory which re-united the country. “The Day of Victory we celebrate in peace and freedom, taking our place in the European family of states and nations,” Kosor said. Serbiaian president Boris Tadic said the anniversary was a date...

BELGRADE -- Today marks the 16th anniversary since the beginning of Croatian army and police Operation Storm that led to the exodus of more than 200,000 Serbs from Croatia. Tadic and Krkobabic in attendance (Beta) Serbian Orthodox Church (SPC) Patriarch Irinej held a memorial service at St. Mark’s Church in downtown Belgrade for the victims of the 1995 military operation aimed against Serb areas of Croatia. The memorial service was attended by Serbian President Boris Tadic, Deputy Prime Minister in charge of refugee issues Jovan Krkobabic, and by other government officials. Representatives of more than 100 refugee and home clubs...

As federal criminal statutes have ballooned, it has become increasingly easy for Americans to end up on the wrong side of the law. Many of the new federal laws also set a lower bar for conviction than in the past: Prosecutors don't necessarily need to show that the defendant had criminal intent.

This story sounds like something you would hear out of China, not the United States. In Gould, Arkansas the city council is planning to pass an ordinance that forbids any group from forming or gathering that will discuss city matters without first getting city council approval – a clear violation of the First Amendment. They mayor is dead set against it but it appears from the video that they can override him: VIDEO This is tyranny on steroids. I can’t imagine this will stand up in court but it appears that the city council wants to test that theory. Just...

While the majority of Americans believe that the country’s morality is poor and lacking, the gap between those looking for the moral high ground and those who believe we are already morally good is closing. A Thursday Gallup poll shows the number of Americans who believe the overall state of moral values in the U.S. is poor has dropped seven percentage points to 38 percent. Meanwhile, the number of those who believe the country's morality is excellent or good has risen eight percentage points to 23 percent. Fewer Americans also believe the country's moral values are getting worse. Sixty-nine percent,...

DEVELOPING: Usama bin Laden was given a religious funeral prior to his burial at sea, senior military officials told Fox News. Religious rites were conducted on the deck of the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier at about 1:10 a.m. Monday in the Persian Gulf. In accordance with Islamic practice, bin Laden was washed and wrapped in a white sheet before buried at sea at 2 p.m. local time, senior U.S. military and intelligence officials said.

Radical Islam is growing in Bosnia Information available to experts on international terrorism indicate that Bosnia Herzegovina is presently one of the epicenters of extremist Islamic circles in Europe, as it represents a hub for potential Islamic terrorists: the so called 'white' or 'European' Al-Qaeda . Money from Islamic countries that is laundered through 'humanitarian' organizations finances the religious education of at least 100,000 young Bosnian Muslims. In addition to such education, which follows the interpretations of Wahhabi Islam, there is another type of 'training' in various officially registered camps throughout the B-H Federation. There, the young and carefully selected...

Livermore police warn female joggers or walkers to be aware of a man who approaches women and pulls down their pants. There have been six reports of a man with dark hair who approaches female joggers from behind on Patterson Pass Road and Holmes Street and pulls down their pants before running away, police said. The suspicious activity has happened at an inconsistent frequency on various days of the week and at different times, police said. In most cases, the women have been listening to digital music players and do not anticipate . . .

Olga sez, "The U.S. Dept of State is proposing a new Biographical Questionnaire for passport applicants: proposed new Form DS-5513 asks for all addresses since birth; lifetime employment history, personal details of siblings; mother's addresses prior to your birth; any "religious ceremony" around time of birth, circumstances of birth including names (as well as addresses/phone numbers) of persons present, & more. Failure to answer can mean denial of passport, & govt reserves right to use this info for 'routine uses.'" Update: Commenters note that this form is specifically intended in lieu of a birth certificate with a passport application; but...

Press, Thy name is Immoral and Immorality. Lady Gaga says to Good Friday "Jesus is my Virtue, Judas is my demon" in her "Born this Way" album and the press has no clue why this is a problem. They hail it as "cutting edge" and "Brilliant" but they don't see the rampant immorality behind it or hail the immorality with the highest praise. The Lord Jesus Christ said to the woman, caught in Adultery' "Go and sin no more" and was truth and grace personified. Because He led a perfect sinless life, He was able to go to the Cross...

Watching Porn At NYC Libraries Is OK, Officials Say April 25, 2011 8:44 AM NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – The latest red-light district in New York City might be found in an unlikely place: your local library. According to a published report, library officials can’t stop patrons from watching porn online on public computers. The New York Post reports that at the Brooklyn Public Library, “customers can watch whatever they want on the computer,” according to spokeswoman Malika Granville. That includes hardcore porn. Library officials offer extensions that can be used to obscure the view of a user’s monitor. They are...

I-Team: NASA losing large amounts of high-tech equipment Nearly $500,000 of items reported lost, stolen...CLICK FOR VIDEO ACCESS CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - In June, NASA’s space shuttle program will take its last flight. The Action News I-Team has uncovered some problems NASA is facing on the ground. NASA reports obtained by the I-Team show $479,108 dollars worth of high-tech equipment simply vanished at Kennedy Space Center in 2010. I-Team reporter Michael George showed the employee lost property reports to Suzanne Pedone of Inventory Management Solutions. Companies hire IMS to keep track of their inventory and prevent items from falling through...

BEDFORD-STUYVESANT, N.Y. (PIX11)— Administrators at Brooklyn Academy High School in Bedford-Stuyvesant canceled Friday's talent show in the wake of a all-girl gang assault on one of the student contestants, PIX 11 has learned. According to authorities, 17-year-old Shacara McLaurin was brutally attacked by at least five other students on April 1st, one of them hitting her in the face with a padlock wrapped in a sock. "Yo, b--ch, I got a lock," one of the teen suspects allegedly shouted, as she pummeled McLaurin with the weapon. "I wasn't able to open my jaw. I wasn't able to talk. I...

A 3 part investigation by the Global Post into Kosovo's endemic corruption and what the US, NATO and Western governments knew before we went in, after we went in, and even before we supported Kosovo "independence". Kosovo's Mafia: Assassinations and intimidation (CIA inspired), Part 2 Kosovo's Mafia: A hotbed of human trafficking (sex slaving), Part 3

China is on course to overtake the US in scientific output possibly as soon as 2013 - far earlier than expected. That is the conclusion of a major new study by the Royal Society, the UK's national science academy. The country that invented the compass, gunpowder, paper and printing is set for a globally important comeback. An analysis of published research - one of the key measures of scientific effort - reveals an "especially striking" rise by Chinese science. The study, Knowledge, Networks and Nations, charts the challenge to the traditional dominance of the United States, Europe and Japan. The...

CHINA used a top-secret SC-19 anti-satellite (ASAT) missile in a test last year against a target missile as part of a missile-defense system that remains shrouded in secrecy. The ASAT missile was fired against a new medium-range missile and details were disclosed in a State Department cable made public recently by WikiLeaks that included an outline of a diplomatic protest note to Beijing about both Chinese weapons programs. The cable provides the first detailed U.S. assessment of what defense officials say is a major strategic advancement in China’s military buildup. It reveals that China’s anti-satellite system was developed for use...

LONDON, March 8 (Reuters) - Western cuts and swiftly rising defence spending in emerging economies are redrawing the global strategic map, a leading think-tank said on Tuesday, with the danger of conflicts between states also rising. In its annual Global Military Balance report, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said the shift in economic power was already beginning to have a real military effect and closing any strategic gap. "Western states' defence budgets are under pressure and their military procurement is constrained," said IISS director general John Chipman. "But in other regions -- notably Asia and the Middle...

FRANKFURT — To hear family, friends and neighbors tell it, Arid Uka was a model youth: never involved in violence, or in trouble with the police, unlike many other young men in his predominantly immigrant neighborhood in Frankfurt. Mr. Uka, 21, they said, was calm and quiet. In 2005, he and some classmates won a government prize for a school project on how to prevent violence in society and posed proudly with Gerhard Schröder, then chancellor of Germany. The young man from Kosovo helped his mother at home, cleaned floors, took out the trash and even gave her half his...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - While Congress brawls over how to shrink a $1.6 trillion budget deficit this year, an even tougher battle has begun over cutting popular Social Security retirement benefits to achieve long-term savings. It's unclear whether Congress will be able to agree on how to reform the massive government pension program, which has provided a social safety net for the elderly since 1935. That in part will depend on whether President Barack Obama throws his weight behind a reform effort that politicians of all stripes fear could be full of political risks. While the president has invited a conversation...

Like so many jihad plots and actual jihad attacks and attempted attacks these days, the jihad murder of two U.S. airmen and the wounding of two others outside the Frankfurt Airport in Germany Wednesday was initially dismissed as having nothing to do with terrorism. According to the German news agency DAPD, Boris Rhein, the interior minister for the German state of Hesse hurried to the airport and almost immediately declared that there were no indications that the shootings had been a terror attack. One wonders what actually would constitute a terrorist attack for such analysts. Would the murderer have to...

Access to the professional networking site LinkedIn was disrupted in China on Thursday, following online calls on other sites for gatherings inspired by protests against authoritarian regimes across the Middle East. Many users in China were unable to access LinkedIn, which is planning an initial public offering set to raise up to US$175-million. LinkedIn could be accessed as recently as Thursday morning, according to two regular users, one a Reuters employee and the other a business consultant, who declined to be identified. Some users who later found they could not access it via the Chinese Internet said the site was...

North, China trade tips on democracy protests February 24, 2011 Meng Jianzhu, China’s minister of public security, made a trip this month to North Korea to discuss ways to prevent the wave of democracy protests in the Middle East from spreading to China and North Korea, according to several South Korean sources. North Korea’s official news agency reported on Feb. 15 that Meng had been received by North Korean leader Kim Jong-il the day before. The visit was initially seen as an endorsement of the plan for Kim Jong-un to succeed his father Kim Jong-il as the country’s leader, as...

A Vienna-born Serbian Muslim named Nedžad Balkan (a.k.a. Ebu Muhammed) is believed to have been behind the most recent terror attack in the central Bosnian town of Bugojno, and his connection to Bosnia and Herzegovina signals the rise of a new and avowedly violent sect of Wahhabis that has regional intelligence agencies on alert. Nedžad Balkan Nedžad Balkan, born in Vienna, Austria, is the son of Bosniaks from Serbia’s predominately Muslim Sandžak region straddling the border of the Republic of Montenegro. A former boxer and night club bouncer in his younger days, Balkan, now in his mid-30s, is the leader...

The exploitation of children is not something that’s happening in the shadows. It’s happening at a place used by some 500 million people. It’s happening on Facebook and it’s a growing problem "Pedophiles have made child pornography, rape, bestiality, incest, mainstream on Facebook,” says Weis. FOX23’s Abbie Alford investigates the plague of child porn on Facebook and what’s being done to stop it. Graphic photos are found on Facebook, "These are underage girls. She can't be more than 10 years old," says Tulsa’s Chapter Director for Stop Child Trafficking Now, Jason Weis. "That looks like a little tiny girl tied...

Chinese officials recently unveiled a new, high-tech stealth fighter that could pose a significant threat to American air superiority - and some of its technology, it turns out, may well have come from the U.S. itself. Balkan military officials and other experts have told The Associated Press that in all probability the Chinese gleaned some of their technological know-how from an American F-117 Nighthawk that was shot down over Serbia in 1999. Nighthawks were the world's first stealth fighters, planes that were very hard for radar to detect. But on March 27, 1999, during NATO's aerial bombing of Serbia in...

A teacher at Oakland’s Markham Elementary School has been suspended indefinitely after school officials said a pair of second-graders performed sex acts on each other in class – with the teacher present. “I think everyone is taken aback over this shocking incident,” Troy Flint, the spokesman for the Oakland Unified School District, told CBS 5 on Thursday. “Of course, it is hard to understand how that could have occurred.” Flint said the sex acts incident was one of two separate cases under investigation involving the teacher; both incidents occurred last week in the same classroom but he said they didn’t...

China is still years away from being able to field a stealth aircraft, despite the disclosure of images indicating that it appears to have a working prototype, Pentagon officials said on Wednesday. The images have been posted on a number of websites and were published on the front page of The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. The Pentagon said they appeared to show a Chinese J-20 stealth fighter prototype making a high-speed taxi test. The disclosure of the photographs comes just days before U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is due to travel to Beijing on Sunday, and analysts could only...

BEIJING (AFP) – China's first Mars probe is expected to be launched in October this year in a joint operation with Russia after a two-year delay, state media reported Sunday. The probe, Yinghuo-1, was due to blast off in October 2009 with Russia's "Phobos Explorer" from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan but the launch was postponed, the official Xinhua news agency said. Quoting an unnamed expert at the China Academy of Space Technology, the report said the blast-off had been pushed back to October this year. It added that China planned to launch a Mars probe on its own in...

China's military is deploying a new anti-ship ballistic missile that can sink U.S. aircraft carriers, a weapon that specialists say gives Beijing new power-projection capabilities that will affect U.S. support for Pacific allies. Adm. Robert Willard, commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, disclosed to a Japanese newspaper on Sunday that the new anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) is now in the early stages of deployment after having undergone extensive testing. "An analogy using a Western term would be 'initial operational capability (IOC),' whereby I think China would perceive that it has an operational capability now, but they continue to develop it,"...

Kosovo’s Organized Crime Burden Dec 20, 2010 By Ioannis Michaletos | In Kosovo, the main managers of illicit drugs are the so-called “15 families,” which represent the core power of the region, because of their financial clout and political connections. In a 67-page report published in 2005, BND (German intelligence agency) analysts concluded that there is “close interaction between the leading members of the Kosovo-Albanian society and the domestic and international underworld currently domiciled in Pristina.” Moreover, “the criminal networks don’t support the creation of a stable political and economic environment, since that will reduce their clout.” What is more...

[...] You will recall how Goldman Sachs wowed the whole world with its dazzling trading. Day in, day out, the traders at Goldman made money. The firm turned in “perfect” trading quarters, with not a single day showing a loss. Surely, one of the junior traders would have miscalculated at least once? Or a seasoned old pro, after a well-irrigated lunch, take his fat finger and hit the wrong button? Nope. Not once did Goldman’s trading machine err. It was uncanny. Almost unnatural. Who was on the other side of those Goldman trades, we wondered? Trading is a zero sum...

Thanks for the Tax Cut!By LARRY DAVID Published: December 20, 2010 THERE is a God! It passed! The Bush tax cuts have been extended two years for the upper bracketeers, of which I am a proud member, thank you very much. I’m the last person in the world I’d want to be beside, but I am beside myself! This is a life changer, I tell you. A life changer! To begin with, I was planning a trip to Cabo with my kids for Christmas vacation. We were going to fly coach, but now with the money I’m saving in taxes,...

The New York Times is reporting that, in the wake of the overturn of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell, prominent homosexuals are gearing up a "war room" in order to try to finish the job of destroying the natural family and one-man one-woman marriage in America. "The new group, Equality Matters, grew out of Media Matters, an organization backed by wealthy liberal donors — including prominent gay philanthropists — that has staked its claim in Washington punditry with aggressive attacks on Fox News and conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. It will be run by Richard Socarides, a former...

More than a third of California's African American public high school students dropped out before graduation day, a startling number and one that's on the rise, according to 2009 data released Tuesday. The 37 percent African American dropout rate, up three percentage points from the prior year, was far above that of any other ethnic subgroup. Hispanic students had the second highest rate at 27 percent. Locally, San Francisco cautiously celebrated a 9 percent overall dropout rate, a stark contrast to Oakland's 40 percent, numbers still under review for accuracy. The statewide statistics highlight a pervasive achievement gap in test...

Doctor who'd been in Haiti contracted disease: officialsLab tests released by health officials Monday confirmed that a doctor who had been returning to Miami on Thanksgiving after fighting the cholera outbreak in Haiti had the disease. The unidentified man had become ill on an American Airlines flight that was heading to Miami International Airport from the Dominican Republic, and was met by a team of doctors when he landed at MIA Thanksgiving night. It's the first known case of cholera in Miami-Dade County ever and just the third in Florida. The disease was eradicated in most first-world countries decades ago....

Well, that WAS the case until two days ago. As I was about to post this blog showing an ‘interesting’ CIA map of Kosovo and Serbia, I noticed that the ‘interesting’ map had been magically fixed this week. Fortunately, I saved the original image, so this blog will proceed as I’d planned, since the significance of the conspicuous “error” having been there in the first place is not diminished by the sudden fix. ******* After running my recent blog — “Ominous Signs in Kosovo: Architect of 1999 Staged Atrocity Finally Admits ‘I Support Greater Albania’ — I heard from reader/source...

J-15 Dreams Greg Waldron on December 2, 2010 Since joining the Flightglobal team I've been burning to write about the elephant in the room: China's aircraft carrier. That she exists is beyond question. Formerly the Russian carrier Varyag, the flattop is tied up in Dalian covered by scaffolding, a tantalizing plume of smoke rising from her island. What's going on in there? Engines gearing up? Apparently she even has a name, Shi Yang, and an auspicious number, 83. Shi Yang was an admiral who invaded Taiwan in 1861. There is plenty of speculation on the Internet, but from the Chinese...

It used to be the tell-tale lipstick on the collar. Then there were the give-away texts that spelled the death knell for many marriages. But now one in five divorces involve social networking site Facebook, according to a new survey by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. A staggering 80 per cent of divorce lawyers have also reported a spike in the number of cases that use social media for evidence of cheating. Flirty messages and photographs found on Facebook are increasingly being cited as proof of unreasonable behaviour or irreconcilable differences. Many cases revolve around social media users who...

Bosnian Islamic fighters during their Jihad which was blessed by President Bill Clinton I come from a member state of the European Union which is meant to uphold the rights of all religions, political ideologies, acknowledge national and cultural rights, and is meant to spread “European brotherhood.” However, it appears that this does not apply to the Orthodox Christians of Bosnia and Kosovo respectively because not only have they been abandoned but outside Islamic powers are stepping up their Islamization agenda in both Bosnia and Kosovo. In Kosovo the de-Christianization of the Orthodox Christian community continues and hundreds of Orthodox...

If you’re looking for someone to blame for the Wikileaks scandal, a good candidate would be President Bill Clinton. He was the one who, in 1995, signed an Executive Order removing “sexual orientation” as a grounds for denying someone a security clearance. Had that policy never been revoked, homosexual soldier Bradley Manning would never have had access to our national secrets and could not have leaked them. According to news reports, Manning decided to turn traitor after a fight with his boyfriend, which somehow motivated him to send hundreds of thousands of confidential documents to Wikileaks leader Julian Assange, who...

New Chinese LACM Unveiled Nov 15, 2010 By Robert Wall wall@aviationweek.com ZHUHAI, CHINA The China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp. (Casic) has unveiled a new air-launched, land-attack cruise missile. The weapon, first shown here at Airshow China, is the latest member of the C-802 missile family. The CM-802AKG, as the new weapon is designated, also has longer range than the air-launched version of the anti-ship C-802A, a company official says. The CM-802AKG range exceeds 200 km, whereas the C-802A has a range of around 180 km. The missile weighs less than 700 kg and is equipped with a multipurpose warhead...